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How Canada’s green credentials fell apart

Canada once enjoyed a deserved reputation for scientific and environmental leadership, but those days are now long gone

By Bob Holmes

Update, 22 October 2013&colon;A survey of more than 4000 Canadian federal government scientists has found that 90 per cent feel they are not allowed to speak to the media about the work they do, 37 per cent say that have been prevented from responding to questions from the public and media in the past five years, and 24 per cent say they had been directly asked to exclude or alter information for non-scientific reasons.

MOST people around the world, if they think of Canada at all, think of it as the national equivalent of the nice boy they’d like their daughter to marry. A bit boring, perhaps, but unfailingly polite, and someone you can always count on to do the right thing. That is a stereotype, of course, but like most stereotypes there is some truth to it, as those of us who live here recognise.

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Lately, though, that nice boy has turned into a bit of a bully. Last year, the Conservative Party of Canada, led by Stephen Harper, won a parliamentary majority after being in a minority government for five years. It has since staked out an aggressively right-wing position on many issues, notably science and the environment.

The Harper government has abandoned Canada’s climate commitments, cut back on science spending and muzzled government scientists who might stray from the official line. Hardly the cuddly Canada the world thought it knew.

That is a big change for a country with a proud history in science and environmental policy. In the 1980s, under conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney, Canada led the way in international policies to control acid rain and chlorofluorocarbons&colon; the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer is the most successful piece of international environmental legislation ever enacted.

Those days are gone. After a decade of tepid efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, Canada formally withdrew from its Kyoto pledges in December. In part this merely recognised that the targets had been a fiction for years, as previous centre-left governments made little effort to cut emissions. This inaction seems to capture the mood of the Canadian public&colon; the one serious attempt to promote a carbon tax, by the Liberal party, ended in electoral disaster in 2008.

But under Harper, the government has moved from apathy to outright hostility. At the 2007 Bali climate conference, Canada and Russia stood alone in opposing science-based emissions targets. Canada’s foot-dragging at the 2009 Copenhagen conference earned it a “Fossil of the Year” award from environmental groups. As host nation of the G8 and G20 summits in 2010, Canada resisted making emissions a priority issue, and the government has continued to advocate strongly for development of Alberta’s tar sands (though, to be fair, resource development is largely controlled at province level).

The government is also considering backtracking on other environmental matters. Last week, a former fisheries official leaked documents suggesting that the government wants to reword its Fisheries Act so that it no longer prohibits activity that harms fish habitat. Instead, the ban would cover only activities that harm “fish of economic, cultural or ecological value”, a much narrower – and harder-to-prove – restriction. The change would make it easier to gain approval for industrial developments such as pipelines.

Meanwhile, the government has been cutting back sharply on its funding of environmental science. Hundreds of staff have been cut at Environment Canada, the federal environmental department. Funding has stopped for the Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory, a key monitoring system for global temperatures and ozone. Its replacement is not due to come online until 2017, leaving a huge data gap at a time when the Arctic is warming faster than any other region and its ozone hole is approaching the size of the Antarctic’s. Funding cuts have also crippled Canada’s air-pollution monitoring network.

Canada’s anti-science policies reach beyond the environment. Last year, the government did away with its compulsory long-form census, which was sent to about 20 per cent of households. By making this census voluntary instead of mandatory, the government effectively destroyed its value as an unbiased baseline of information on Canadian society and the economy.

Of course, the government has an electoral mandate and is entitled to enact its programme. But it should also welcome robust debate about its policies, and the reality is that the government is stifling that debate by restricting its scientists’ ability to speak frankly about their work.

The Canadian government is stifling debate by restricting scientists’ ability to speak frankly

Environment Canada’s media protocol, introduced in 2008, requires scientists to get official approval before talking to the press – a demand that often delays an interview well beyond journalists’ deadlines and results in the public never hearing from the scientist at all. It also can lead to the scientist being forced to parrot the official line on an issue. The protocol states&colon; “Media relations will work with staff on how best to deal with the call. This should include asking the programme expert to respond with approved lines.” Other departments, such as Fisheries and Oceans Canada, have similar policies.

The result is that Canadians – and the rest of the world – have been denied the chance to hear from some of the most authoritative scientific voices on important issues ranging from the Arctic ozone hole to radiation after the Fukushima Daiichi reactor accident in Japan, and even the effect of aquaculture on wild salmon.

What’s worse, the silence comes just when the government’s environmental policies are most in need of vigorous public debate. The effect has been stifling. According to a leaked Environment Canada internal document, media coverage of climate change has fallen by 80 per cent since the policy came into force.

During the presidency of George W. Bush, many liberals in the US regarded Canada with envy. Canadians who care about science and the environment now know exactly how they felt.